Conflict over education in America is getting more intense, and more central to the country’s politics, as it’s become more about culture and identity. Former U.S. President Donald Trump, now officially a candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, released a video last month saying that America’s public schools “have been taken over by the radical-left maniacs” and warning against “pink-haired communists teaching our kids.” One of Trump’s potential rivals, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, is now among the United States’ most prominent opponents of “woke” progressivism in education—and one of many Republican governors to have passed significant restrictions on how schools teach about U.S. history and issues of race, gender, and sexuality.
Jeffrey Sachs and other critics of these new laws associate them with a new climate of confusion and fear among educators, while others—including prominent Democrats—frame them as reactionary, even “authoritarian.” Yet Republican leaders argue they’re just responding on behalf of voters to educational institutions that have gone out of control. According to a recent study by David Houston of George Mason University, meanwhile, American voters themselves are now developing their views on these issues increasingly along partisan lines. Why is this happening?
Rick Hess is the director of education-policy studies at the center-right American Enterprise Institute. To Hess, this growing division in American life represents a major departure from the last few decades of political debate about U.S. schools—an era defined more by technocratic, often bipartisan, efforts to reform primary and secondary education through standardizing testing, accountability measures, changes to funding mechanisms, and charter schools operating independently of the traditional public system. But the new division isn’t entirely new, either, Hess says—or entirely bad.
Graham Vyse: How unprecedented are the cultural battles we’re seeing today over education in America?
Rick Hess: You mightn’t imagine it, but it’s actually been normal throughout U.S. history for cultural tensions to drive public debate about education. In the 19th century, there were major disputes about compulsory schooling, what languages were acceptable in schools, who could attend them, or the status of parochial schools—all of which were along ethnic or religious divides.
Later in the 19th century and into the 20th, there were ferocious clashes over the “Jim Crow” laws in the South, enforcing racial segregation; later in the 20th century, over the desegregation laws of the Civil Rights era; later still, over “bussing” laws that mandated transporting students to schools within or outside their local districts to diversify the schools’ racial compositions.
But there was also a steady stream of very consequential, but less well-remembered, fights about curricula and educational access: There were conflicts over the teaching of science, which frequently turned on questions of religion and faith. There were conflicts over schooling for students from German, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Irish, East European, and Mexican communities. As the century went on, American education was variously consumed by fights over communism, school prayer, the Pledge of Allegiance, efforts to outlaw private schools, efforts to legalize homeschooling, the issue of teen pregnancy, the role of faith.
In this sense, the last few decades have been unusual—when the focus turned away from these value-laden questions about what should happen within schools and toward more technocratic questions about policy levers for improving the performance of schools: What are the right funding mechanisms? What are the right choice mechanisms? How best to hold schools or universities accountable? And so on.
Right now, there’s a feeling in America that it’s somehow weird for there to be so much cultural conflict in public debates over education. But from a historical perspective, the last 20 or 30 years have been a vacation from this kind of conflict. You could say that, in the substance of the fights, what the United States is experiencing right now is more the norm than not.
Vyse: What’s caused the shift back to that norm?
Hess: One thing that’s set the stage for it is that, before the 1980s, education wasn’t really ever a defining issue in U.S. national politics. In the eras of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, that really started to change. Educational policy became more technocratic, but it also become more important politically—for Democrats, as a way to show they were committed to investment and impact rather than handouts; for Republicans, as a way to show they were sincere about equal opportunity. Now, education is a big national issue in America.
There’s a feeling in America that it’s somehow weird for there to be so much cultural conflict in public debates over education. But from a historical perspective, the last 20 or 30 years have been a vacation from this kind of conflict. You could say that, in the substance of the fights, what the United States is experiencing right now is more the norm than not.
In this context, the country has since become much more politically polarized. And that polarization has changed the way that both parties have thought and talked about education. For Clinton, for Bush, for Barack Obama, education was an issue where national political candidates could play to voters in the middle. What you see now is that aspiring presidents, or governors, will use education—as they’ll use so many other national issues—to reassure and energize their base.
In the meantime, there have been other important transformations: First, in higher education, the faculty population as a whole has continued to move further to the left—and so, overall, further from mainstream American sensibilities. In the 1980s, Democrats outnumbered Republicans among faculty by about two-to-one; today, it’s about five- or six-to-one.
Second, along the way, after the killing of Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014—and especially after the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 2020—the idea of anti-racism started to gain more prominence in primary, secondary, and higher education, even while its definition often remained unclear or contentious.
And third, there was the pandemic—which upended a lot of American parents’ sense of schools’ and colleges’ custodial relationship with their children. There’s been a long-established sense that these are institutions where we send our kids, where our kids are taken care of, and where we place a high degree of trust. It’s a kind of covenant between parents and educational institutions.
The pandemic disrupted that covenant—and as it did, this disruption started to exacerbate some of the reservations a significant ratio of parents had about the implicit and explicit politics of the instruction their kids were getting. The pandemic created a new environment that deeply changed American parents’ relationship with schools and universities—and that brought these latent issues to the surface.
Vyse: Conservative activists and Republican elected officials have responded to this changed environment with lots of new laws and regulations. Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis has been front and center.
Some of DeSantis’s initiatives have appeared quite dramatic, including restrictions on what public schools teach about race and U.S. History—and bans on teaching about gender identity and sexual orientation until fourth grade. In Florida’s higher-education system, he’s now working to remake the historically progressive New College into a conservative institution. He’s also recently proposed mandating Western-civilization courses, weakening faculty-tenure protections, and prohibiting “critical race theory,” along with “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives.
What would you see as being most novel and consequential about what DeSantis is doing here?
Hess: There are some echos in what Ron DeSantis is doing in Florida today of what Ronald Reagan was talking about while running for governor of California more than half a century ago—pushing back, for example, on a lot of the progressive initiatives underway at the University of California, Berkeley. In a sense, there’s nothing new under the sun in American education.
For Clinton, for Bush, for Barack Obama, education was an issue where national political candidates could play to voters in the middle. What you see now is that aspiring presidents, or governors, will use education—as they’ll use so many other national issues—to reassure and energize their base.
But while Republican governors have historically railed against what they’ve viewed as ideological skewing in primary and secondary education, it’s fair to say DeSantis is the first Republican governor to push back from that perception so openly and assertively.
While we’ve seen Republican governors try to shape governance in higher education, we’ve never really seen them do it as explicitly and thoroughly as DeSantis is doing it at New College. And while we’ve seen Republican governors, and Republican legislators, try to force some more public oversight of spending in higher education, we’ve never seen the aggressiveness that DeSantis is showing in accountability for spending on “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives. This is all a big step beyond what strong, prominent Republican governors were doing even a decade ago.
Vyse: DeSantis’s critics tend to view these inclinations and initiatives as politically cynical, illiberal, and chilling—the idea being that educational institutions should have a certain degree of freedom from political control in how they make their decisions and DeSantis is illegitimately taking that from them. Do you see merit in that view?
Hess: Honestly, I think a lot of those criticisms tend to be unfair, if not hypocritical—for a couple of reasons.
One is that public schools in America are democratically governed. They educate the public’s children with public funds. The employees of these schools are public employees. DeSantis himself is meanwhile a governor who won a thumping victory at the polls and went on to enact educational reforms—like the “Stop Woke Act” [prohibiting instruction on race relations that categorize people as either privileged or oppressed based on their race, ethnicity, or sex] or the Parental Bill of Rights [restricting what public institutions can do to direct the upbringing, education, health care, and mental health of a minor child without parental consent]—not through executive action but through the democratically elected legislature: the people’s representatives. It’s hard for me to think of anything more consistent with democratic governance than a governor putting forward a series of initiatives and the legislature choosing to enact them.
A second is, I question whether there’s anything really illiberal about the substance of the legislation. If you look at the substance of the “Stop Woke Act,” for instance, it explicitly requires that Florida schools teach about many of the elements of American history that progressive educators and activists also want to teach about. It requires that schools teach about slavery; it requires that they teach about Jim Crow; it requires that they teach about the Civil Rights Era.
While we’ve seen Republican governors, and Republican legislators, try to force some more public oversight of spending in higher education, we’ve never seen the aggressiveness that DeSantis is showing in accountability for spending on “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives. This is all a big step beyond what strong, prominent Republican governors were doing even a decade ago.
What I see DeSantis pushing back on—quite appropriately for the most part—is not any requirement that these subjects be addressed but a predetermined ideological agenda for how they’re addressed. There’s a lot of room for debate about the legislation DeSantis has put forward, but the heart of it isn’t illiberal; it’s the idea that students shouldn’t be preached to or given prepackaged answers.
Vyse: To that point, DeSantis and other Republican leaders pushing for education reforms argue that schools are now “indoctrinating” students in progressive ideology, often in ways that are at odds with what their families and the broader public would want. That’s a harder claim, suggesting something more sinister than preaching or prepackaging answers. What do you make of it?
Hess: I don’t think it’s entirely fair, either. “Indoctrination” tends to presuppose a kind of conspiracy, and that’s not quite right.
I do think, though, that in America, a very particular ideological worldview has come to dominate higher education, teacher training in primary and secondary education, and the preparation of administrators and materials at every level. And I think it’s fair for opponents of this worldview to identify it and, as they see fit, confront it.
A year or so ago, a lot of the media coverage of Republican legislation on educational reform characterized it as a set of initiatives to stop schools from addressing slavery or Jim Crow—when really, it was about how schools addressed these chapters in American history.
Rarely has U.S. media coverage captured the extent to which this new Republican legislation was directed against the dominance of a very specific set of nostrums—associated with the views of “anti-racist” progressives such as Ibram X. Kendi, or Robyn D’Angelo, or Kimberle Crenshaw—some of which are genuinely contentious, such Kendi’s idea that every position in public policy is either anti-racist or racist. If you’re for lower capital-gains rates, for example, that’s a racist position. If you’re against the legalization of marijuana, that’s racist too.
So there can be hyperbole on both sides, and I think the idea of “indoctrination” tends to be hyperbole. But I also think that, if we really want to understand what’s going on here democratically in America, we need to understand that there are legitimate concerns behind the language of “indoctrination.”
Vyse: To what extent do you see this pattern of cultural conflict over education in the U.S. as part of a broader global pattern?
Hess: When we look at the rise of populism and polarization, I think we can see them as having emerged in a way that’s bound together, propelled one another, and brought cultural conflict to the fore in all kinds of ways. And I think education is a natural, if not inevitable, locus for cultural conflict.
There can be hyperbole on both sides, and I think the idea of “indoctrination” tends to be hyperbole. But I also think that, if we really want to understand what’s going on here democratically in America, we need to understand that there are legitimate concerns behind the language of “indoctrination.”
Now, in America, my perspective would be that the mainstream media also tends to lean to the left on cultural issues. Which I think explains a lot about why you tend to see these disputes framed as phenomena basically manufactured by conservative politicians—for cynical political purposes—even when the supposedly “conservative” position is very close to the center of American public opinion.
But as you look around the world, you can see this same gap between sentiments dominating higher-education systems and sentiments in the population at large—and sometimes between sentiments dominating higher education and sentiments among other elites. In France, for example, you can see President Emmanuel Macron, along with a broad swath of the French cultural vanguard, deeply concerned about the importation of what they see as ideological extremism from the American University.
Vyse: Don’t they refer to it as American “wokeism”?
Hess: They do. They see is an American export.
You can see some of the same concerns in Germany; you can see some of them in the U.K. The difference is, these countries don’t have anything really comparable to the unusually large, influential, and well-funded community of institutions that make up American higher education.
One reason why the fights about higher education can get so intense in the U.S. is that American universities have extraordinarily powerful alumni networks—often including influential relationships with important lawmakers and public officials.
You don’t really see that same kind of dynamic at work elsewhere in the world. Germany and the U.K., for instance, have perhaps a couple of dozen universities that would compare with America’s top 50 or 100. And these German or U.K. universities have much less freedom to develop their own institutional cultures in the way elite American institutions of higher education do. And then, if you look at Asia or South America, you see leaders in higher education charting culturally independent courses for their institutions even less than you do in Germany or the U.K.
In this sense, there’s a kind of American exceptionalism at work in U.S. educational culture—primarily in higher education, but in a way that also influences teacher training and school leadership throughout the education system. The culture has developed in a way that’s, by global standards, unusually distant from the social and cultural center of gravity outside of it. Which is why, I think, we’re seeing such a distinctive backlash against it.
Ultimately, educational systems can only work in harmony with the societies and cultures around them. To the extent they hold themselves too far removed, they’ll bring an inevitable reigning-in from those who pay for the systems and use them—and vote. I understand why people of goodwill working within these systems might feel threatened by this process—but it’s a process propelled by the reality of democratic accountability.